us, even as are Jonson's moderns, because they are the expression of a psychic faculty which could neither rightly perceive reality nor finely express what it did perceive. He represents industry in art rather than inspiration. The two contrasted pictures, of Jonson writing out his harangues in prose in order to turn them into verse, and of Shakespeare giving his lines unblotted to the actors-thinking in verse, in the white heat of his cerebration, as spontaneously as he breathedthese historic data, which happen to be among the most perfectly certified that we possess concerning the two men, give us at once half the secret of one and all the secret of the other. Jonson had the passion for book knowledge, the patience for hard study, the faculty for plot-invention; and withal he produced dramatic work which gives no such permanent pleasure as does Shakespeare's. Our dramatist had none of these studious characteristics; and yet, being the organism he was, it needed only the culture which fortuitously reached him in his own tongue to make him successively the greatest dramatic master of eloquence, mirth, charm, tenderness, passion, pathos, pessimism, and philosophic serenity that literature can show, recognisably so even though his work be almost constantly hampered by the framework of other

men's enterprises, which he was so singularly content to develop or improve. Hence the critical importance of following up the culture which evolved him, and above all, that which finally touched him to his most memorable performance.

VII

THE POTENCY OF MONTAIGNE

IT is to Montaigne, then, that we now come, in terms of our preliminary statement of evidence. When Florio's translation was published, in 1603, Shakespeare was thirty-seven years old, and he had written or refashioned KING JOHN, HENRY IV, RICHARD II, HENRY V, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, TWELFTH NIGHT, AS YOU LIKE IT, ROMEO AND JULIET, THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, and JULIUS CAESAR. It is very likely that he knew Florio, being intimate with Jonson, who was Florio's friend and admirer; and the translation, long on the stocks, must have been discussed in his hearing. Hence, presumably, his immediate perusal of it. Portions of it, as we

have seen, he may very well have read or heard of before it was fully printed (necessarily a long task in the then state of the handicraft); but in the book itself, we have seen abundant reason to believe, he read largely in 1603-4.

Having inductively proved the reading, and at the same time the fact of the impression it made, we may next seek to realise deductively what kind of impression it was fitted to make. We can readily see what North's Plutarch could be and was to the sympathetic and slightlycultured playwright: it was nothing short of a new world of human knowledge; a living vision of two great civilisations, giving to his universe a vista of illustrious realities beside which the charmed gardens of Renaissance romance and the bustling fields of English chronicle-history were as pleasant dreams or noisy interludes. He had done wonders with the chronicles; but in presence of the long muster-rolls of Greece and Rome he must have felt their insularity; and he never returned to them in the old spirit. But if Plutarch could do so much for him, still greater could be the service rendered by Montaigne. The difference, broadly speaking, is very much as the difference in philosophic reach between JULIUS CESAR and HAMLET, between CORIOLANUS and LEAR.

For what was in its net significance Montaigne's manifold book, coming thus suddenly, in a complete and vigorous translation, into English life and into Shakespeare's ken? Simply

the most living literature then existing in Europe. This is not the place in which to attempt a systematic estimate of the most enduring of French writers, who has stirred to their best efforts some of the ablest of French critics; but I must needs try to indicate briefly, as I see it, his significance in general European culture. And I would put it that Montaigne is really, for the civilised world at this day, what Petrarch has been too enthusiastically declared to be the first of the moderns. He is so as against even the great Rabelais, because Rabelais misses directness, misses universality, misses lucidity, in his gigantic mirth; he is so as against Petrarch, because he is emphatically an impressionist where Petrarch is a framer of studied compositions; he is so as against Erasmus, because Erasmus also is a framer of artificial compositions in a dead language, where. Montaigne writes with absolute spontaneity in a language not only living but growing. Only Chaucer, and he only in the CANTERBURY TALES, can be thought of as a true modern before Montaigne; and Chaucer is there too English to be significant for all Europe. The high The high figure of Dante is decisively medieval: it is the central point in later medieval literature. Montaigne was not only a new literary phenomenon in his